News Bites
This disruptive tech will transform every industry says O'Leary's right-hand man
The future is already here, and that lies in artificial intelligence, said Alex Kenjeev, president of O’Leary Ventures.
“Pick your sector, and you can start to see how artificial intelligence is going to transform it,” Kenjeev said. “My favorite is healthcare. You just think about the potential…in the future, and not the distant future, in the near-term future you’ll be able to go see a registered nurse and she or he will have an artificial device of some sort and that device will do a significantly better and more accurate job diagnosing you.”
The long-term effect of the rise of automation is more workers being replaced by software and robots, but the near-term effect will not be a rise in unemployment, Kenjeev noted.
“In the medium term, I don’t see massive unemployment, I see a shift in skillsets. It’s going to be a while before there’s nothing left for us to do, if that day ever comes. I wouldn’t worry about it in the near-term. In the longer term, there’s two ways of looking at it. Unemployment has a sad tone to it…imagine a day in a hundred years where we have the luxury of the same kind of GDP expectations that you would had. The robots aren’t idle, they’re doing the work, so we have the same economic output as before, theoretically, but am I going to work today? That sounds great. I can’t wait to be replaced by a robot as long as I keep getting a salary,” he said.
Kenjeev doesn’t think that the current technology sector is overvalued.
“A lot of the trends that were accelerating the sort of concentration of economic activity into the hands of technology type of companies have been accelerated in the last year,” he said.
